A visual history of the beehive, lecture at la Villa Médici, Rome

On the 14th of October 2021 at 7pm, Apian will give a talk about the history of the hive at la Ville Médici – the French Academy in Rome. The talk will be in French with a live Italian translation, you can book free tickets here.

The lecture will explore the forgotten history of the beehive – its past, present and future –, building from a large corpus of archive images. Directly related to “Hives, 2400 B.C.E. – 1852 C.E.”, the presentation will also explore Apian’s more recent archive called “The Intimacy-Machine”. Blending the two projects together will help to question how architectures designed for bees have evolved and could be transformed in the near future by the forthcoming of sensing technology in beekeeing practices. Indeed, potentially, sensing technology could help to reintroduce certain forgotten hives’ structure…

Image

Note annexe

[ID: Screenshot of the Villa Médici’s website. The page is mostly white, you can some yellow lines from the webpage’s layout. At the top left corner, there the Academy logo and in the middle of the page appear an archive image showing several beehives in black and white. The image is there to illustrate Apian’s up coming talk.]

Thanks to Dardard for the invitation (Association de culture et d’apiculture urbaine à Paris Nord). Based in the north of Paris, the collective elaborates different projects around bees, beekeeping and honey. From education to political and ecological involvement, they collaborate with bees to create emulation around this important little insect. Early this year, they established an apiary at the Villa. For more about the apiary visit this link.

For more info about the conference, go here.